Abstract. In comparative concurrency semantics, one usually distinguishes between linear time and branching time semantic equivalences. Milner’s notion of ohsen~ation equirlalence is often mentioned as the standard example of a branching time equivalence. In this paper we investigate whether observation equivalence really does respect the branching structure of processes, and find that in the presence of the unobservable action 7 of CCS this is not the case. Therefore, the notion of branching hisimulation equivalence is introduced which strongly preserves the branching structure of processes, in the sense that it preserves computations together with the potentials in all intermediate states that are passed through, even if silent moves are involved. On closed KS-terms branching bisimulation congruence can be completely axioma-tized by the single axiom scheme: a.(7.(y + z) + y) = a.(y + z) (where a ranges over all actions) and the usual laws for strong congruence. WC also establish that for sequential processes observation equivalence is not preserved under refinement of actions, whereas branching bisimulation is. For a large class of processes, it turns out that branching bisimulation and observation equivalence are the same. As far as we know, all protocols that have been verified in the setting of observation equivalence happen to fit in this class, and hence are also valid in the stronger setting of branching hisimulation equivalence.

The most popular method for establishing bisimilarities among processes is to exhibit bisimulation relations. By definition, R is a bisimulation relation if R progresses to R itself, i.e., pairs of processes in R can match each other's actions and their derivatives are again in R. We study generalisations of the method aimed at reducing the size of the relations to exhibit and hence relieving the proof work needed to establish bisimilarity results. We allow a relation R to progress to a different relation F(R), where F is a function on relations. Functions which can be safely used in this way (i.e., such that if R progresses to F(R), then R only includes pairs of bisimilar processes) are sound. We give a simple condition which ensures soundness. We show that the class of sound functions contains non-trivial functions and we study the closure properties of the class w.r.t. various important function constructors, like composition, union and iteration. These properties allow us to cons...

this paper have been presented at the 4th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, University of Essex, 1992; at the Tempus Summer School for Algebraic and Categorical Methods in Computer Science, Masaryk University, Brno, 1993; and the Summer School in Logic Methods in Concurrency, Aarhus University, 1993. I would like to thank the organisers and the participants of these summer schools, and of the Banff higher order workshop. I would also like to thank Julian Bradfield for use of his Tex tree constructor for building derivation trees and Carron Kirkwood, Faron Moller, Perdita Stevens and David Walker for comments on earlier drafts.

In this chapter, we present a hierarchy of infinite-state systems based on the primitive operations of sequential and parallel composition; the hierarchy includes a variety of commonly-studied classes of systems such as context-free and pushdown automata, and Petri net processes. We then examine the equivalence and regularity checking problems for these classes, with special emphasis on bisimulation equivalence, stressing the structural techniques which have been devised for solving these problems. Finally, we explore the model checking problem over these classes with respect to various linear- and branching-time temporal logics.

We consider the verification of a particular class of infinite-state systems, namely systems consisting of finite-state processes that communicate via unbounded lossy FIFO channels. This class is able to model e.g. link protocols such as the Alternating Bit Protocol and HDLC. In an earlier paper, we showed that the problems of checking reachability, safety properties, and eventuality properties are decidable for this class of systems. In this paper, we show that the following problems are undecidable, namely ffl The model checking problem in propositional temporal logics such as Propositional Linear Time Temporal Logic (PTL) and Computation Tree Logic (CTL). ffl The problem of deciding eventuality properties with fair channels: do all computations eventually reach a given set of states if the unreliable channels satisfy fairness assumptions. The results are obtained through a reduction from a variant of Post's Correspondence Problem. This research report is a revised and extended ...

We study the decidability of the model checking problem for linear and branching time logics, and two models of concurrent computation, namely Petri nets and Basic Parallel Processes. 1 Introduction Most techniques for the verification of concurrent systems proceed by an exhaustive traversal of the state space. Therefore, they are inherently incapable of considering systems with infinitely many states. Recently, some new methods have been developed in order to at least palliate this problem. Using them, several verification problems for some restricted infinite-state models have been shown to be decidable. These results can be classified into those showing the decidability of equivalence relations [8, 9, 24, 26], and those showing the decidability of model checking for different modal and temporal logics. In this paper, we contribute to this second group. The model checking problem has been studied so far for three infinite-state models: context-free processes, pushdown processes, and...

Baeten, Bergstra, and Klop (and later Caucal) have proved the remarkable result that bisimulation equivalence is decidable for irredundant context-free grammars. In this paper we provide a much simpler and much more direct proof of this result using a tableau decision method involving goal-directed rules. The decision procedure also provides the essential part of the bisimulation relation between two processes which underlies their equivalence. We also show how to obtain a sound and complete sequent-based equational theory for such processes from the tableau system and how one can extract what Caucal calls a fundamental relation from a successful tableau.

. The paper provides a structural characterisation of the reachable markings of Petri nets in which every transition has exactly one input place. As a corollary, the reachability problem for this class is proved to be NP-complete. Further consequences are: the uniform word problem for commutative context-free grammars is NP-complete; weak-bisimilarity is semidecidable for Basic Parallel Processes. Keywords: Petri nets, Commutative Context-free Grammars, Basic Parallel Processes, Weak bisimilarity. 1. Introduction The reachability problem plays a central role in Petri net theory, and has been studied in numerous papers (see [5] for a comprehensive list of references). In the first part of this paper we study it for the nets in which every transition needs exactly one token to occur. Following [8], we call them communication-free nets, because no cooperation between places is needed in order to fire a transition; every transition is activated by one single token, and the tokens may flow...

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. We consider the factorization (collapse) of infinite transition graphs wrt. bisimulation equivalence. It turns out that almost none of the more complex classes of the process taxonomy, which has been established in the last years, are preserved by this operation. However, for the class of BPA graphs (i.e. prefix transition graphs of context-free grammars) we can show that the factorization is effectively a regular graph, i.e. finitely representable by means of a deterministic hypergraph grammar. Since finiteness of regular graphs is decidable, this yields, as a corollary, a decision procedure for the finiteness problem of context-free processes wrt. bisimulation equivalence. 1 Introduction In concurrency theory, process calculi are widely accepted as algebraic description languages for concurrent systems. Their semantics are usually formulated in terms of labelled transition graphs which model the dynamic behaviour together with some notion of behavioural equivalence. Since there is...